Chapter 150
She stared at Arya with unblinking eyes, her left eye the only window to everything she saw and everything she concealed.
Then, when the silence between them began to feel too long, too heavy, too much like air that had remained still for far too long, Nirma finally opened her mouth, her voice emerging in the same tone she used when ordering Arya to shoot or when rejecting Ashita's offer in the ruins of Heraclea—flat, devoid of excessive emotion, yet beneath that surface there was something moving, something like a current beneath a calm river.
"That information," she said, letting the words hang in the air that held no echo, allowing Arya to wait a moment before she continued, "is not enough. I need to know more. Not about the twisted verses, not about the message in the sky over Jerusalem that occurred nearly a thousand years before we were born, but about what the Temporal Cross-Police did after they discovered that message. Did they simply read it, store it, report it to higher authorities, and then let it gather dust in archives that would never be opened again? Or did they truly act, truly send their agents to the places mentioned in those verses, truly attempt to understand what they were dealing with before it became too large to control?"
Arya did not answer immediately, and in that nameless room, in a place where even a movement as small as an inch could become a journey to a year never intended, he did something he rarely did.
He raised his left wrist before his eyes, revealing the watch that had long circled his brown skin, a watch he had never removed even in this room where time moved in non-linear ways, a watch that remained the only object he carried from his former life before he chose to become a defector without a second thought.
His fingers, accustomed to pulling a trigger, moved with effortless precision, clicking the button on the right side of the watch once, twice, three times, and upon the glass surface that had never cracked despite enduring more battles than could be counted, a blue light began to appear, not bright, but clear enough to be read by eyes accustomed to reading reports in the dark.
But as that light began to form numbers, words, sentences arranged in the official report format of the Temporal Cross-Police that had never changed since the institution was first established, something happened to Arya's face, something Nirma had never seen in the years they had been together—not when they were surrounded by a hundred weapons in Heraclea, not when the Police airship chased their train toward Psamathia, not even when Nirma first invited him to join her and he had to choose between everything he had built and a woman who had killed his own comrade's parents.
Arya's face turned pale, pale like the sky before sunrise, pale like the cloth wrapping an unnamed corpse, pale like something that had just realized that what it once considered an ordinary threat was something far greater, far older, far more terrifying than anything it had ever imagined.
He turned toward Nirma, and in his eyes—those irises that were never truly black nor truly brown—for the first time since she had known him, there was something resembling fear.
Not the kind of fear that made him want to run, not the kind that made him want to surrender, but the kind born from understanding that what they now faced was no longer merely an Abnormal that could be shot or confined within a dimensional cage, but something that had moved on a scale beyond their imagination, something that had infiltrated the most fundamental flow of history, something that had placed itself at the intersection where all paths led to the same point.
"According to the report I managed to access," his voice came out differently than usual—lower, slower, like someone trying to speak words too heavy for his own tongue to carry, "the Temporal Cross-Police did not remain idle. They did not let that message turn into dust in forgotten archives. They deployed agents—not one or two, but dozens, perhaps more—stationed across several golden ages and also the most fragile periods of the five major religions mentioned in those twisted verses."
He paused, swallowing, his throat drier than usual, and at his temple—an area that had never perspired even when he ran across deserts or swam through nameless seas—tiny beads began to form, droplets Nirma would never have noticed had she not been sitting directly across from him within arm's reach.
"Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism. All five became targets of observation, all five were fitted with monitoring devices never used for ordinary Abnormal cases, all five were treated as equally important by an institution we have always known as a slow and inefficient bureaucratic machine. And from all the anomalous movements within timelines that were supposed to remain intact, from all the data they gathered through hours of uninterrupted surveillance, one pattern emerged—one pattern that cannot be ignored by anyone still capable of recognizing the relationship between cause and effect."
Haaaah!
"The movements of this Abnormal, the attacks that have begun altering the course of history in unseen ways, appear to be centered on two of the three Abrahamic religions—Christianity and Islam."
Nirma heard those words leave Arya's mouth with a clarity that needed no repetition, and within her mind, in the space where she had stored all the information she had gathered, all the clues she had uncovered, all the puzzles she had solved in her own way—untaught by any school—something flashed like lightning across a sky that had long been dark.
Christianity and Islam.
Two religions born from the same root, two religions that worship the same God in different ways, two religions that had clashed for centuries on the same lands, in the same cities, among the same ruins.
Two religions whose Crusades she had witnessed herself in Heraclea Cybistra, where Crusader forces and Seljuk armies collided in a battle never recorded in history books because history had been rewritten by hands that did not want anyone to know that behind the storm that swallowed both armies, there was a five-headed entity carrying out the will of something greater than itself.
To be continued…